Fertility, immortality - and demography as destiny.
Today, I'm looking at male fertility - or lack thereof - by choice or lack therof.
This topic was inspired by a workshop by team Flux Trends is running for a medical insurance industry client this week (if you want us to kick start a similar thought-provoking conversation around trend informed strategy for your team, let me know at connected@fluxtrends.co.za) where the topic of long-run population decline, and its implications for "pay as you go" public and private sector social security sustainability was a core part of the program.
The signal in question looks at how men are speaking out about their sadness about not having/ being able to have biological children of their own. It is, undoubtably, ethics of human body and body part aside, trading easier and cheaper for a healthy, fertile biological women who wants to have her own biological baby to get one - even without a male partner via a sperm bank, than it is for a healthy, fertile single man to find and pay for a surrogate or adoption.
Male sadness about losing their lottery ticket to genetic immortality is not as visible or spoken about as their female equivalents.
Indeed, it is a story that runs counter to the prevailing "Snip-Snip Hooray" trending narratives on TikTok, the general media, and even scientific journals - especially in the wake of the Rode vs Wade reversal in the USA - however, that heuristic that more women want to be mothers than men want to be fathers deserves to be challenged (and worked into your employee health benefits packages that offer women fertility and maternity benefits air a far greater rate than men) - gender dynamics are far from binary stereotypes.
How gender inclusive is your company fertility policy?
What gender stereotypes do you / we need to overcome?
Is access to and support of access to fertility treatment treated the same as access to birth control treatments? - If not why not? What are the ethics of tactic or explicitly supporting population growth vs population decline through your national and corporate policy and perks programmes?
Are you an anti-natalist?
Or are you more like Elon Musk and his 11 (now, known) children?
After all - when it comes to the future - every vote counts - and your vote on contributing to the future global gene pool and population - or not is one of the moist important votes you get (and hugely telling of your general optimism towards life in general).
Read more:
Grief of lost immortality : https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/28/unspoken-grief-childless-men
Snip snip hooray? https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230309-snip-snip-hooray-tiktok-trend-dispels-vasectomy-myths
Trends / not trends : https://www.ghspjournal.org/content/11/1/e2200369
We all want to live forever - one way or another :
https://whatthefuturenow.com/2021/07/16/deed-seed-creed-and-the-war-on-biology/
Snip-snip hooray?